


I Walk, I Trust, With Open Eyes

by Interrobam



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Mother Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 00:36:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1569527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interrobam/pseuds/Interrobam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He hated being home with anxious Narcissa, who god help her had more than enough magic to do something with her life, but no initiative past being the noble wife. "</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Walk, I Trust, With Open Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leiascully](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Broken Home](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15715) by [leiascully](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully). 



> Title is from the poem “The Angel of the House”

They go out infrequently after Draco comes home.

The boy looks dreamily at the empty spaces in rooms, the curling vine patterns in wallpaper, and seems to Narcissa far too overwhelmed by these familiar sights to tolerate disturbance. She herself goes out to town, once, but someone slams a door and she feels such a pain that for a moment she believes that someone has apperated a bird into her ribcage and that it is scratching and beating and tearing her lungs. She has trouble walking home, she cannot speak for two hours.

But Lucius sends her letters. They seem like they come from another world, from a strange man who talks of strange things and begs them to visit. He writes shakily, he has a persistent, phantom conviction that Draco is still in danger. This delusion is gripping, his letters are sometimes vicious. She does not resent him for the hard words he puts down, she cannot imagine being in Azkaban, alone, unable to press her hand against the warm pale hair of her son. She takes Draco to him, and she watches from an archway that feels more stable than the cells around her. She does not listen to what they talk about. When Draco comes back, his face dark and his eyes cast in a strange light, she feels like she is slipping into mist. She wants to say to him: 'when I was a child, when I was not much older than you and my friends and I roamed in gangs and practiced our spellwork on muggle flesh, I did not know what it was to ask a mother to choose her husband or her children' she wants to say 'and now I know, and now I cannot imagine choosing anyone but you' she wants to etch that upon him, her choosing of him. She opens her mouth and words fail her. They return home.

After visits, and from time to time between then, she stops at the wide, candy-glass windows that overlook their gardens and slowly turns her wedding ring around her finger. Like the earth holds the moon in its orbit, so the turn of her ring supplies just enough gravity to keep her running her paces. Sometimes she feels, in the moment before the cold pads of her fingers surround the hot metal, that she is about to be scattered to the winds in a million pieces, that she is about to vaporize. She imagines herself turning all to charcoal, floating up to the ceiling and smearing dark stains on it like the ones above the chandelier in the dining room. But she has responsibilities.

When Draco came home she held his hand tight like he was the child she remembers, likely to wander off in favor of some grand possible adventure and get himself lost. She held his hand tight enough that it started to feel cold, and she wished she could take his bloodless hand to her mouth and kiss it, and she wished she could hold him against her shoulder, and she wished she could cry, and she wished so many things. But Malfoys and Blacks have a certain way of not showing affection. Narcissa was not even sure where to start, what words to say to the child soldier beside her, how hard a mother is expected to hug and how soft her voice must be. She remembered being a soldier, with Bellatrix and Lucius next to her and the weight of her mask strange across her brow, holding her arm out for her mark. On that crisp forest night her mouth had tasted of candy, and never in a thousand lifetimes would she have expected to arrive there, at that moment in time in a crowded train station, lost.

“I didn't do it,” Draco said once they were inside the carriage, and she was staring hard out the window because she knew her face was strange and she did not want him to worry. She was not sure, is not sure, if he spoke on behalf of his defense or his prosecution.

“That's alright, Draco. Everything worked out just fine. That is why we take care to be prepared.” Her voice came out like a raven with pebbles in its mouth, all croaking, muttered coolness. She remembered her hand in Severus', the unbreakable vow. She had told herself, years before Draco had set foot in Hogwarts, that she would die the most agonizing of deaths before she allowed him to be a part of the Dark Lord's work. It stung to realize, on the night when she first learned of His plans, that she was a coward. That she could not move her mouth to refuse, that she sat and listened and bowed her head. But at least she was a clever coward, at least she was a ruthless one, and her Lord would not mind that Draco had flinched so long as the Headmaster was dead. And she did not mind anything, Lucius or Dumbledore or the fate of the Wixen world, so long as Draco stayed solid and real on the other side of the carriage.

Most days they do not visit, and most days she does not have to turn her ring around her finger, and most days she is free to sit across the drawing room from Draco and watch his eyes dart with inner workings. He has not often spoken to her, she thinks perhaps he resents her. She wonders at the way things change, a year ago his indifference would have wounded her, but now she did not mind it. She wonders how much of this he blames her for, and words play at the back of her throat 'I have done all that I am capable of.' She is not sure if she thinks this in her defense or her prosecution.

All Slytherins are sorted for their ambition, but there are times when ambition is very small, and very simple. Narcissus had schemed and lied and fought and spat, let all other aspirations settle acidly in the pit of her stomach, for this: the movement of Draco's ribcage up and out as he breathes in, the folding of it as he exhales.

The most precious of all things.


End file.
